


Out of Darkness

by Major



Category: Scream (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Drama, F/M, Ghosts, Romance, Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-09
Updated: 2016-12-09
Packaged: 2018-09-07 12:13:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8800423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Major/pseuds/Major
Summary: Billy didn't go away after he died.  Or rather, he didn't stay gone.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gloriousmonsters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloriousmonsters/gifts).



> I loved this prompt. The whole idea of it was really interesting, and I had fun writing it. Happy holidays!

Billy didn't go away after he died. Or rather, he didn't stay gone. He first came back when the trailers for _Stab_ started popping up on TV, glimpses of a Hollywood warped exploitation of Sidney's life wedged between cough drop commercials and _Top Story_ , complete with 'Based on a True Story' tagged onto the R-rating. That was a nice way to put it. 'Sensationalized garbage to take advantage of other people's trauma' was more apt but probably nixed by PR.

She was alone in her dorm room while Hallie was showering down the hall and just hung up after mocking yet another annoying prank caller that thought harassing victims of violence was the epitome of a good time when out of the ether, defying the impossible, another voice - not faked - had her spin around where she stood.

"Careful, Sid."

Billy was leaning against the wall beside the window, looking down at his fingers in a pair of jeans and a white t-shirt like a thousand memories of him waiting next to her locker for her to get her stuff so he could walk her to class. Just there. Like he wasn't dead and buried at a funeral Sidney had forced herself to go to just to watch the coffin lower and know it was finally, really over. Fate and closure weren't in sync, it seemed.

A hundred phone calls, frat guys running across campus in costume with rubber knives, the nightmares that kept her up at night and refused to let her forget even for one day what her best friend looked like dead in the garage door—none of it scared the hell out of her the way his sudden, inexplicable reappearance did. She was crazy or he was there, and neither option was okay.

"Not everyone is after a laugh," he warned.

Her heart was pounding, and her throat closed in fear that was as gripping as the night he came at her with a knife and she put him down with a bullet. Worse, because at least that had been possible. Rules had to matter, had to protect her, or the nightmares could chase her out of her dreams.

Billy looked up from his thumbnail and was startled to find her staring right back at him, frightened and paralyzed. He slowly pushed himself off the wall, staying back but head leaning forward the way he used to do when he was trying to catch her eyes and ask if she was all right: when her mom died, when her dad was leaving her home alone to go on a trip, when he was alive.

He seemed almost hesitant to ask, but the eye contact went on long enough to push him into it. "Can you see me?"

This was what happened to some minds after a trauma. They broke. She must have been breaking.

The door to the room opened, and Sidney jumped as she turned to it. Hallie walked in with her shower cart in hand, already shaking her head and smiling as she quickly filled Sidney in on the gossip she overheard in the restroom. Sidney was breathing too heavily as she turned back to Billy, but he was gone. No trace of her splintering sanity was left behind.

She swallowed it up and willed it away. It was the stress of the movie premiere and the uptick of harassment lately from both her peers and the media. It was flashbacks and a lack of sleep. It was a million things that added up to nothing, because Billy couldn't have been there. There were rules and a shot to the head to keep that true forever.

She spent the night in Randy's dorm that night with a wall of pillows stacked between them in the narrow bed. It was the closest to home and normal (and Tatum) that she could get.

****

If Billy showed up again before the murders started, a blessing kept Sidney ignorant of his presence. In her experience, blessings were short-lived and rare to arrive. Cici Cooper was dead. Maureen Evans and Phil Stevens were dead. Her boyfriend was injured, and doubt of his innocence had a face in her memory, laughter shared at bedroom windows, hands down her body and lips against her throat. Now it had a voice.

"It's definitely Derek," Billy said at her shoulder. Sidney stopped walking halfway across the grassy knoll on campus. Her two bodyguards stopped twenty feet behind, but how could they save her from a break in her mind? "That whole cafeteria serenade thing was laying on the good boy routine pretty thick, wasn't it? You call it a romantic gesture. I call it deflecting suspicion. You ask me, the whole boyfriend-killer gag loses its pizazz when it's just a rip-off of the original."

Sidney turned to face him. Her guards stayed back but kept a close watch. She looked around and tried not to look like she was talking to herself. Even then, even fraught in the middle of another series of murders, afraid and unsure, she knew she wasn't. He was there. Somehow.

He looked exactly like she saw him the last time he was alive, except without the blood. It was more startling that way. Bloody and injured, she might have found it easier to dismiss him as a poltergeist that got caught in his own twisted games and was trapped between worlds as a consequence. As he was, it was much harder not to see the years of friendship and first love that came before the destruction. It made her sick.

"You're here." It was resignation as much as an admission. She could see him. It was confirmation he wanted.

He leaned forward, hair falling in his eyes in that way that used to draw her fingers in to push it back. They clinched into a fist at her side.

"So are you," he replied, purposefully not addressing the monumental acknowledgement she was giving him. Who knew how long he had been following her, waiting for her to look back and hear him. It made her skin crawl. "Can't be killed, looks like. You sure your dad is your dad? Maybe one of the many, many men your mom was sleeping around with was indestructible. Gave you bulletproof skin."

A glance back caught her guards watching her strangely. She moved behind a tree and kept her face down to avoid drawing attention. "I don't want you here."

Whatever was going on, the _why_ and _how_ was inconsequential to that truth.

"That makes two of us."

They locked gazes. His eyes still had that weight of melancholy behind them, the brooding fatigue of getting knocked down too many times in life and being just shy of giving up on the effort of having to pick himself up again that initially drew her to him. It was exhaustion that mirrored back at him from inside herself. He was tired even in death.

She lifted her chin and faced off with him once more without knives or the soothing metal of a gun in her hand. He couldn't hurt her then, and he couldn't get her now.

"So leave."

The intensity that radiated off of him hadn't died with him. It pulsed like a second skin around him. He took a step towards her, and her back hit the tree bark as she took a matching one away from him, maintaining distance between them that felt more familiar than anything else. Space had dictated so much of their relationship, hard lines and limits, never getting too close until all boundaries dropped. They came together just to blow apart forever. Or what was supposed to be forever.

"Wish I could." A glance at her guards broke the tension of his stare that dug too deep inside of her the way she hated. And used to love. "Watch your back, Sid. Or you might be over here with me soon."

He disappeared, and she didn't see him again for three years.

****

It wasn't Cotton's death that brought him back. It was the nightmares about her mother. She woke up gasping and clawing at the sheets. Her nightmarish version of her dead mother was gone, the accusatory words of being just like her faded to the back of her mind where they would circle for the rest of the day. Sidney brought death to everyone around her, and death couldn't let her go.

Billy sat on the window seat in her bedroom, staring out at the woods she buried herself within with an electric fence and a dog and the hope that she could stay alive by not really living. Being safe wasn't the same as not being afraid.

She hadn't seen Billy since she killed his mother to save herself, but she often felt someone in the room with her, familiar eyes on her back, whispers that nearly reached her ears but settled softly in her mind. _Night, Sid._ She didn't think he ever really left her or that he even could.

She didn't believe for a second that it was over. Her dad wanted her to believe that anyone could have killed Cotton and it could have been entirely unconnected to her, but Sidney knew better. Death wouldn't let her go.

Billy turned away from the moonlight, and it pushed the shadows back on his face. He looked just like he had the night she met him at the railroad tracks after his dad went off on him for tanking on his report card and forgetting to bring him a beer. He'd gotten a fresh bottle himself and thrown the last empty one hard enough at Billy to bruise the corner of his dark eye.

They stayed out the whole night, lying out on the tracks and not moving to safety even as lights turned the corner and the ground began to rumble. Sidney wouldn't move until he moved. It felt important at the time to let Billy choose when enough was enough. They rolled to the grass just as the train roared past them and left the ground quaking as Billy stared down into her eyes where he had rolled on top of her. Moonlight had played across his handsome features, and she thought it was the first time she had really seen him in a way she could understand. The bruises revealed himself, an unmasking he hadn't intended but couldn't be unseen.

Tonight, there were no bruises, but memories of knives and broken promises - to love her, to kill her - kept him in the light. He couldn't hide from her any more than she could hide from him. The life and death between them exposed too much to duck back in the shadows.

"Do you know who's doing this?" she asked. To Cotton, to his girlfriend, to her. He dropped his head against the glass and shook it. No one lied better than Billy. She fell for those lies too many times to excuse. "You're saying you're not—"

"Omniscient?" he finished, and his voice turned dry. "I'm dead. Not God."

Skepticism played across her heart, the same heart that had trusted him when it should have known better.

"Would you tell me if you did?"

Billy looked back out at the sky like the abyss would part, open up and take him. "I can't leave you. I've tried. I close my eyes, and I'm back where you are. If I could kill whatever is keeping me here, I would, but I can't."

Sidney sat up, leaning against the headboard as she realized what he was getting at. "And you don't know what will happen to you if I'm not here anymore. If I die."

He didn't say anything, but she remembered bruises and train tracks, the way he used to kiss her when he didn't want to go home. She remembered what Billy looked like when he was afraid.

"I'd tell you if I knew," he said.

She believed him.

****

In the end, it was the half-brother she never knew she had behind the murders, Billy and Stu's homicidal tutor.

The second Billy appeared when she got home, the anger rose up in a wave that washed all the relief of surviving away. She grabbed a paperweight off the edge of her desk and threw it at him. He flinched away as it pounded into the wall and hit the floor with a hard thud that repeated like a drum in her temples where the anger at him was building into a headache she wasn't going to be able to knock out with Tylenol or an ice pack. It was the kind of pain she had to ride out until she pushed through to the other side.

"You are so full of shit!" she yelled.

It was easier to be angry at him than to direct it at herself, but it was on her. Liars lied. She was the stupid one for believing for even a second that he deserved an ounce of trust, that he would help her when she needed it even if only to protect himself from the unknown.

Billy's jaw tightened as he took a step towards her. She didn't step back. She was done giving Billy Loomis any more of her space.

"I didn't know it was him."

Liars lied even when they were caught lying. She shook her head incredulously. "You didn't know it was Roman?"

The man who approached him, poisoned him, set him on the path that brought them all down.

"No," Billy insisted, eyes wide. "I didn't. This may be hard for you to understand, but things have been a little fuzzy for me since you killed me."

"Since I defended myself, you mean."

Billy turned and ran his hands through his hair. She wanted him to keep walking, to disappear and not come back.

When he turned back, he looked like the boy who used to turn the radio on but didn't ask her to dance. The boy in the early days that brushed the back of his hand against hers in the hallway but wouldn't take her fingers in his. The one who wanted something from her but wasn't sure how to get it. "Sidney, I didn't know—"

She raised her hand against the lies she was still too bruised from fighting for her life to manage and walked away. "I want you out of my house."

Out of her life.

She didn't look back to see if he was gone. She was tired of looking back.

****

In her effort to purge Billy from her life, she had a full-body checkup at the doctor. She got scans and ran every test her insurance covered. She wanted him to be explained. Being sick would be worth it, because being sick came with a treatment plan, an exorcism of her haunting. No such luck.

When she got home, he went from a presence she couldn't see to sitting out on her back patio as the sun set behind the trees. The fading light went down in a prism of purple and streaks of orange.

She went outside and, after a moment's hesitation, sat down beside him on the top step.

"You are officially not a tumor," she informed him. Not that he didn't already know the results.

Even when he wasn't there, he was _there_. She could feel him. For the past several days, what she felt was a brooding wall, the kind that went up when Billy was around his father and couldn't afford to let the walls come down. Billy could fake a lot, but dejection was one of the oldest things she knew about him. He wore it like a hood over his head, hair falling in his face when he tried to be invisible.

He wouldn't look at her, and she wasn't sure if it was relief or regret she felt. "I could still be a hallucination."

_We all go a little mad sometimes._

Leaning against the railing, she tried to wrap her head around death when it was sitting right beside her, a reaper she got before it got her.

"You didn't know it was Roman," she said, and this time it wasn't a question laced with accusation.

Billy was Billy, the parts she had loved and tried to forget, the parts she hated and fought to hold tight, but he was also something else. Something gone but still here, an anomaly with traces of a person who didn't exist anymore. He was trying to get a handle on himself as much as she was.

He didn't answer, and she still wondered if he would have warned her if he had carried that information over with him to this half-life he had now. She wondered a lot of things.

"Do you see Stu?" She looked down at her lap where she was wringing her hands together and looked back at him, asking the question she wasn't sure she wanted an answer to, "Tatum? Or my mother?"

Or Randy? Hallie? Derek? Billy deserved to be stuck. Stu and Roman could walk Earth forever for all she cared, but it pained her to think that her friends were trapped somewhere out of sight, unable to move on to whatever was next or find peace.

Billy leaned forward, forearms on his knees and looked at her in that way that used to make her duck her head, too shy to feel so exposed beneath the laser-like focus he could turn on her. She stared back evenly now.

"I only see you." The sun sunk lower, and the light was almost lost to memory when he added, "Kind of always been that way."

Whether either of them wanted it to be true or not. Sidney wrapped her arms around herself as the night turned cold and wondered what would happen when she died. If she would be stuck too. They sat outside together long after the last of the light fell away.

****

"Maybe I have to forgive you," Sidney murmured one night when Billy was stretched out across the couch and she had her legs curled up underneath her on the other end.

"I didn't hide your necklace. I already told you, I can't move things. I'm not a poltergeist. I'm just dead," Billy replied in mild annoyance without taking his eyes off of the TV screen where Gale was announcing that she was leaving her show to marry Dewey and move to Woodsboro for a quieter life. Sidney was happy for them.

She sighed and pushed her hair behind her ear, feeling Billy's presence beside her even though he could kick out and go straight through her. There without being there. Maybe that was their entire relationship from the first moment he sat next to her in the cafeteria sophomore year across from Stu and Tatum and offered her half his Twix, back when he was just a boy and she was just a girl.

"No," she clarified. "To make you go away. Or move on. Whatever is keeping you here. Maybe that's it."

Billy looked over at her then, and Gale became blurred background noise under the intensity of his scrutiny. After a long while, he sighed as heavily as she had and returned his gaze to the screen.

"Guess I'll be here forever then."

The silence that hung between them was louder than she could take. She turned the volume up and let Gale speak so they wouldn't have to.

Yeah. He probably would.

****

It took two birthdays after the murders stopped for Sidney to notice something she had been waiting for all too long. Billy noticed too. Dewey was cutting the cake out in the dining room that he decorated with streamers and balloons the way he used to do for Tatum when they were kids. She could hear Gale and her father talking about his last business trip in a way that sounded like an interview. Gale was always looking for profitable dirt in even the most mundane accounts.

She pulled the plastic cups out of the cabinet and was surprised to see Billy sitting on the counter beside it when she closed it. He'd gotten in the habit of disappearing when her family was around. If she didn't know better, she would have blamed guilt. She did know better, though. Billy left, because her family reminded him of his own. If he resented anyone more than her, she figured it was himself: his failure, his death, every tie he had to people who proved they didn't want him.

"Your nightmares stopped," he said.

"No, they didn't." She smiled at him sarcastically. "You're still here."

"Ha."

She smiled more genuinely and headed back to the party, stopping at Billy's next words.

"I'm sorry." 

She paused at the door and looked back at him. He wasn't talking about today or being stuck with her. He was looking down a long road that stretched behind them with no end and too much emptiness on either side.

It wasn't 'Happy Birthday', wasn't tied up with a bow or handed to her with a card, but it was the closest thing to a gift that Billy could give her. It was painfully inadequate. Painfully believable with his solemn eyes on her. She learned not to believe the believable, but it was a nice lie for what it was.

She looked down with a small nod and accepted his meaning if not its actual worth. "I'll save you a piece of cake, so you can stare at it later."

One of the best parts of having Billy around was rubbing all the things he couldn't have in his face, eating was a prime reason for smugness.

"I'd rather stare at the Bacardi."

He disappeared as she rejoined her friends, and she left a piece of cake and the half empty bottle of booze on the kitchen table for him before she went to sleep.

****

_And I began to believe myself that, that was all I was, a victim, and that was unacceptable to me. So I sat down and began to write a new role that would be my own, a role for a woman who could leave the walls of fear behind and step out into the sunlight, out of darkness._

Sidney spent a lot of time swatting Billy away, but he still spent most of the time she wrote her book reading over her shoulder. His hands were on either side of the back of her chair as he finished scanning the passage she was currently editing.

It reminded her of study sessions when they were teens when he'd pretend to read the biology notes she had across her lap and she pretended that she wasn't going to kiss him when his cheek brushed against hers. Time had a way of editing and rewriting a person's life without any input from the person that got rewritten.

Her publisher was expecting a final draft soon, and her first reader was the ghost she spent the last several months putting into words that fell short of the actual experience of knowing him, loving him, breaking free of him. In life, anyway.

"A little saccharine, isn't it?" he concluded.

She scoffed. The last thing she needed was notes on the book about her trauma from the person who did the traumatizing.

"It's not saccharine. It's," Sidney searched for the word before going with, "inspirational. Besides, you do not get to talk. You're the whole reason I even have a book to write in the first place. That whole attempt-on-my-life thing was a catalyst, so. You know. Shut up."

"My apologies to everyone who has this on pre-order," Billy replied dryly. Sidney shot him a look, and he rolled his eyes away with a small smirk. "It's good."

"Yeah?"

He nodded. "That's the part you should read out loud on the book tour. Tease the groupies with hope and get them to open their wallets for a signed copy."

She turned back to the chapter and considered it as he leaned back against her desk, staring off at the opposite wall in thought. It looked too much like watching him relive the past, so she didn't probe him on it. Instead, she chortled. That got his attention.

"What's funny?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Gale will be pissed if my book sales are better than hers."

Billy smiled, and she hated that she didn't hate that smile anymore. Or maybe she liked that she still did, even dead. Everything with him was contradictory. He could throw her into the past with a glance, yet she couldn't move forward without him. In her worst moments, she wondered if she still wanted to.

****

The night before her publicist was set to send her back to Woodsboro for the book tour, Sidney woke up from her first nightmare in months. She still had regular ones: back in high school before a test, trapped on stage naked, that kind of thing, but this one had a knife in the grip of a gloved hand and screams that weren't just hers and were more than a fantasy in her mind.

She gasped her way out of it, back into the cool half-light of her bedroom where locked doors and barred windows kept the nightmares at bay. On good days, she left the door open and let the breeze come in while she made dinner or worked in her office. On bad days, like the eve of her return to her hometown where it all happened once there and over and over again in her mind, she set the alarm and checked it twice before turning in.

Billy was lying on the other side of the bed. He didn't sleep, but he went quiet for long spells, just laid there most nights and rested. Sidney could feel him at her back or inside dreams, a presence that hummed across her skin and weaved through her subconscious. She forgot what being alone felt like without Billy being alone with her.

He turned his head on the pillow and looked at her, saw the nightmare she left behind. His voice was softer than the starlight through the thin curtains as he murmured, "I'm right here. And I don't have a mask anymore."

No. And she didn't have any alarms that could keep him out either. She locked herself in with him every night. "You weren't the only one who liked masks."

"You're not a victim anymore," he reminded her. Wasn't that what the book said?

Sidney smiled wistfully and turned over with her back to him. There was no 'anymore'. The book was just a reminder of that.

"I never was."

She sensed Billy rolling onto his side too, but even back to back, they were facing each other's worst truths. Billy was right. There weren't any masks anymore.

****

Sidney got used to ignoring Billy when other people were around. Ten years went by without a slip. It would have been harder for someone else, but she had been trained since high school to expect attention to be on her. It wasn't ego; it was experience. She was the girl whose mother died, then the girl whose best friend was murdered three times over, never getting to say goodbye to Tatum or Hallie or Randy. Above all else, she was the girl who survived. The final girl.

That was why, for the first time in ten years, she broke her rule and talked to Billy in front of someone else. He wasn't always there. He could wander a little, stray to another room, down the block, across the hall, but Sidney knew Billy was close the way she felt the echo of grief inside her heart, a shadow of darkness and light in her memory and against her skin. Static and broken love.

"Billy!" she called out for him, down in the basement with her cousin's friend, Kirby, of all people.

It wasn't any of her new friends, wasn't her father or Billy or even Gale, who no doubt would have written an expose on Sidney's 'victimization induced psychosis' if she ever caught her talking to ghosts. It was a girl she barely met that was friends with a cousin she hardly knew.

"Who?" Kirby asked, backing up and looking through the blackness with eyes that weren't used to being in it. Sidney could see much better. She was used to the dark.

She ignored her and called him again.

"He's not upstairs."

She spun around to find Billy peering around the basement like Kirby, but where she was afraid, he was alert. After the first murders during her return to Woodsboro for the book tour, the settled nature of their life (and it was _their_ life, thanks to Fate's vengeful eye) was disrupted. They went quiet even when they were alone. It was hard to talk over all the memories rising to the surface.

"You're sure?"

"I can't get much farther." Not for lack of trying. They tested the limit for years. Sidney would stay in one place, and Billy would try to get as far away from her as he could. The tie between them, however cruel, went taut before he ever got far. After a while, he stopped trying to leave and she stopped asking him to go. "I didn't see him."

Stepping out of the darkness wasn't just about finding the light. It was about allowing herself to let go of the dark. Her grip on it had been so tight for so long that it shouldn't have surprised her that it would try to grasp her by the ankles and yank her back to it just when she was starting to feel free.

She felt a bitter smile take hold of her, one she used to answer Gale's questions with back when her life was first becoming entertainment for the masses. "God. Would you even tell me?"

Billy stopped looking at the dark corners to look at her, if there was still a distinction. "Don't start that shit. You know me."

"Yeah, that's the problem."

He killed her mother, killed their friends, tried to kill her. He was no better than whoever was up there now trying to kill her again. He was the reason, the inspiration, the original.

"Who are you talking to?" Kirby asked, wide-eyed. "Oh God, you've gone crazy, right? All the psycho killing made you want to psycho-kill everybody else."

"No."

"I hope he psycho-kills her next," Billy drawled.

"Shut up."

The rest was chaos. Running, screaming, trying not to die: it was too much like before but once again, it was her own family that turned on her. The millennium, revenge, violence in films; it all held more weight than a motivation for fame. All that death in the pursuit of something worth nothing. It was sickening and everything Sidney had worked so hard to leave behind.

Jill stabbed her, left her bleeding on the floor, and even with her eyes closed, she could feel Billy sit down beside her on the cold tiles in the kitchen. His hand was in her hair. She felt his fingers like a warm breeze against her head.

"I almost admire them. They don't have an original bone in their bodies, but the whole filming-the-murders thing was pretty smart." His lips moved to her ear as she played dead, and he whispered, "Don't die, Sid."

She wondered if it was a matter of _if I can't kill you, no one can_. Just the same, as consciousness slipped away, she was glad to not be alone. Glad that Billy was with her as the darkness she stepped out of with all the fight she had in her, swallowed her whole all over again.

In the end, she survived, because that was what Sidney always did.

"The can't-be-killed thing used to piss me off," Billy said as he walked alongside her wheelchair when she was released from the hospital a few weeks later.

Dewey pushed her towards the parking lot, and she smiled wryly as she glanced up at Billy. "And now?"

Billy raised an eyebrow as he replied, "Now I mostly just want to know your secret, so I do better in the next life."

"I think you only get this one." The one with her, for whatever it was worth.

"Something wrong, Sid?" Dewey leaned forward so he could hear her better, but she shook her head.

"Nope." She was alive. She made it. She knew better than to ask for more than that.

****

The girls in school used to stare at Billy when he walked down the hall. There was something about him, something dark, that drew attention even if it was passing and forgotten when he rounded the corner and disappeared. Sidney prided herself on not being one of those girls until she wasn't one of them, she was _the_ one.

Being sixteen and sitting under a tree after school, she tried to pretend that she wasn't even when he came up and sat beside her. That shadow that pulled her in was the same shadow that urged her to look away.

Billy handed her a dandelion, its stem freshly plucked from the ground across the way. She twirled it between her fingers, eyes downcast, determined not to be the girl looking at Billy Loomis, but her eyes betrayed her. The strangest part about looking at Billy was seeing him look at her. Something inside of her shifted under the weight of his gaze, something new and young, somewhere near her heart.

Billy leaned forward and blew on the flower. Small white and golden-yellow clouds drifted away on the wind, the parts that made it pretty, and left it a little broken in her hand. She should have let it fall away but held on to it tighter. She was never good at letting go.

As he leaned forward and kissed her, she tensed, bracing for impact against the possibility of something good. Billy caught her hand, and the gift got crushed inside his fist. He pushed her back into the grass, and Sidney forgot why she thought the flower looked so good when it was perfect. Its real beauty was in the flaws and the defeat.

It was a kiss she went back to all her life. Not because it was the best or meant the most, but because it was the first time she surrendered to something she couldn't control. Back when love was scary. That part never changed.

****

Sidney woke up early and went out front where Billy was sitting on the top step of the porch waiting for dawn. Sitting beside him, she rested her hand next to his in the empty space between them.

His hand turned as they watched night break beneath the morning light, and the warmth of it brushed the back of hers, stopping short of taking her fingers in his but staying close enough to remind her that he was there. That maybe he even wanted to be. She didn't move away.

It wasn't happily ever after, but there _was_ an after. She was ready to step into the sunlight and out of the darkness to reach it.


End file.
